An electronic payment is a financial transaction in which an amount of money is exchanged electronically between a vendor and a buyer. Typically, this involves systems and processes of debits and credits using computer networks, public network such as internet and digital stored value systems.
A micropayment is an electronic payment of a very small amount of money, from few cents to few dollars, and generally less than 10 US dollars, which is used to purchase different kinds of goods on the internet. Generally, the goods are immaterial goods such as information like web pages, newspaper or magazine articles, stock quotes, comic strips, clip art and music tracks, software and computer games, or access means to access to some shared resources, like databases, applications or common services.
For electronic payment and more particularly for micropayment, the conventional payment means, i.e. credit card payment, is not suitable as the final cost of the goods is prohibitive due to the cost of card transaction processing, leading thus the good less attractive to buyers.
Pre-registration at an online payment solution is also a solution for electronic payment or micropayment; however, this solution is not user friendly due to the registration process which may be long and complicated.
It has also been suggested to use a premium rate or special rate phone number, which the buyer has to dial to get an access code, given by artificial or pre-recorded voice messages recorded onto an Interactive Vocal Server. The buyer must then have to enter this code into a web form provided by the seller on his website to gain access to the good. For a given vendor, the phone number is always the same for all consultation and all purchases, the code being different for each purchase, and randomly generated to match the identification system.
An alternative to the special rate phone number is the use of premium SMS (Short Message Service). The consumer sends a payment request via an SMS text message to a short code, a special telephone number, or to an international number format telephone number. The merchant involved is informed of the payment and can then allow the access to the good, or a SMS message comprising an access code is sent to the buyer, which he has then to enter into a web form to gain access once to the good.
In premium rate telephone numbers or premium SMS, the telephone or mobile phone bill of the buyer may be then charged for the purchase of the amount corresponding to the purchase.
These solutions present the drawback, among others, of having a poor transformation rate which is, for a given vendor, the percentage of users making purchases out of the total number of visitors of the web site during a reference period. The transformation rate is a good indicator of the capacity of the web site to transform visitors into buyers.
Furthermore, these solutions, as all the solutions providing access codes, also called tickets, present the drawback of being prone to errors, comprehensive errors during communication of the code, or typing errors when the buyer enters the code into a web form. The buyer is then debited for his purchase as the access code was given to him but he cannot gain access to the goods he wanted, leading to the discontentment of the buyer. Thus, a need exists for a system and method for electronic payment between a seller and a buyer to purchase a good providing a dynamic allocation to the seller of predefined SMS numbers and predefined SMS messages.